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Time Out!

It’s that time of year again right?

Spring awakens new possibilities.

The church and school “year” is coming into new rhythms as the specter of summer is rising.

I hear everyday of all the balancing acts that many of you, beloved Foothills folks, are currently engaged in – like amateur tightrope walkers thrust into the middle of the circus to perform on the high wire- and it astounds, humbles and confuses me.

It’s just that time of year again right?

In Greek (typical thing for a minister to say right?), there are two works for the concept of time. Chronos, is the more familiar one – that sense of time as sequential, chronological, as moving in one direction, always and ever forward.

That is the sense of time that compels us to say, “It’s just that time of year again”. I usually fool myself into believing that once “this time of year” passes, as it does in its rigid but not always orderly way, that I am promised something will change. And yet, if I am to be honest, it always seems like “it’s that time of the year”.

Which is where Kairos, the second notion of time holds and saves us. Kairos asks us to uncover what in the time is emerging. What events of significance are pushing their sprouts up to the surface of our souls ready for us to tend to them?

What season do you find your ‘self’ in right now? Beyond the soul-compressing demands of chronos, what sprouts of possibility do you dare to recognize that are pushing their way out of the compost of the moment?

My challenge to you, and if I am truthful, to myself even more, is to balance our cultural indoctrination in the world of chronos with a love of kairos. A new texture of time that dares us to live with the question posed by social justice warrior Grace Lee Boggs: “What time is it on the clock of the world?”. I think, the answer is not simply, April, 26, 2017.